Dear readers,

To celebrate Pride Month, we’ve curated a Queer Lit collection to highlight the work of our LGBTQ2S+ authors and other LGBTQ2S+ stories.

In her award-winning crossover novel Prairie Ostrich, Tamai Kobayashi paints a compelling portrait of Egg, a feisty and endearing outsider, who sits quiet witness to her unravelling family as she tries to find her place in the bewildering world of schoolyard battles and adult mysteries.

Joelle Barron’s poetry collection, Ritual Lights was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ Writers. Barron’s spectacular poems travel through grief and loss, heartbreak and repression: never finding an answer, but discovering meaning in the work of continuing.

Kazim Ali’s recently released Northern Light is an engrossing exploration of home, belonging, and identity. In this compelling memoir, Ali returns to the site of his earliest memories — a temporary town in the forests of northern Manitoba — where he must confront the environmental and social impact of the Jenpeg dam that his father helped build and face the effects of colonialism and cultural erasure.

"A graceful, elegant account even when reporting on the hard truths of a little-known corner of the world." — Kirkus

Check out our Queer Lit collection for more amazing books; visit our blog for Pride Month reading lists from some of our authors; and share your own on Instagram with the hashtag #GetQueerLit. You’ll be in good company. Some of our authors have already shared a reading suggestion or two. 

Mark your calendar with these upcoming events!

June 4 to July 3: Marlene Creates, Between the Earth and the Firmament, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2020, exhibition at Paul Petra Contemporary Art

June 10 to Sept 6: Itee Pootoogook: Hymns to the Silence, exhibition at Audain Art Museum

June 23 at 7 p.m.: A Sweet Syrian Story, North Durham Refugee Reunification Fundraiser online with Jon Tattrie (Peace by Chocolate)

July 1: Peace by Chocolate Drive-in Movie Premier at Ontario Place

July 2 to July 9: Amy Spurway (Crow) and Wayne Curtis (Fishing the High Country) at Read by the Sea

July 8 at 7 p.m. EST: Tom Thomson: Artist and Icon with Ian Dejardin (A Like Vision) at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection's Virtual Speaker Series

Aug 17 to Aug 22: Writers at Woody Point Festival, featuring Douglas Walbourne-Gough (Crow Gulch) and other exciting literary voices

Sept 23 to Sept 25: Lunenburg Lit Festival, featuring Tyler LeBlanc (Acadian Driftwood) and more

Available October 5

Myself a Paperclip Triny Finlay sketches the internal self and the external whir of the psychiatric ward, laying bare its daily rhythms. Memories, musings, echoes, and meditations on stigma coalesce: quarters dispensed into a payphone to listen to the stunned silence of a partner; Splenda packets and rice pudding hoarded in dresser drawers; counting back from ten as electrodes connect with the temple.  Myself A Paperclip confronts abuse and experiences with debilitating mental illnesses, therapies, and hospitalizations

The Lost Time Accidents In this timely and powerful debut, Síle Englert explores what it is to feel othered in a world where everything is connected. Moving through time and memory — from childhood to motherhood, from historical figures and events to the precarious environment of the Anthropocene — Englert’s voice brims with grief while still holding space for whimsy. The Lost Time Accidents challenges the reader’s perceptions, finding empathy for the lost, the broken, and the overlooked.

Click here for the complete fall catalogue.